Transitioning to university study
Before you begin the semester, it's a good idea to plan how you are going to achieve your goals. Make a list of your assignments and their deadlines and make a checklist of the tasks you will need to undertake.
Watch the video below to get some top tips from Ruby on how she organises her studies:
Note-taking
One of the skills that you will need to master is note-taking, both in your lectures, but also when undertaking independent reading.
Having identified good quality academic resources on your topic, and carried out extensive reading, you will have to decide what will be useful for your assignments. A key part of this process involves extracting key messages from texts and ignoring details, which may be interesting, but not useful for the task you have to do.
To do this, you may want to adopt a consistent method to taking notes from your reading. For instance, you may want to follow the suggestions in the table below. Making good quality notes, in your own words, will allow you to both synthesise information and consolidate your understanding:
| Source 1 (publishing details) | Source 2 (publishing details) | Source 3 (publishing details) | |
| Summarise the theme of the source | |||
| What is the author's argument? | |||
| List three or four points made by the author to support this argument. Provide ideas or facts from the text which supports each point selected. |
More information on note-taking can be located here.